by Monroe, Max
One thing was for sure. When you engaged with these guys, you’d better be ready to go the distance. Luckily, I had an extensive background in shit-talking, and all in all, I had the goods to back it up. I was comfortable on the field, and when really necessary, absolutely thrived under the pressure.
“Well, I guess we’ll see,” Cam remarked, rolling the toothpick in his teeth to the other side of his mouth and grinning. “First game this weekend will settle that.”
I nodded. We would see at the first game. It would be make it or break it time, and I had everything inside me gearing up for it by the day.
Everything smart inside me, that is.
The stupid parts—ironically linked to my dick—were focused on something a little different.
And as it happened, Sean decided to play right into my stupid dick’s metaphorical hands.
“So how exactly do you mess up a piss test anyway, Landry? I’ve been dying to know. Personally, I’m a pro when it comes to handling the one-eyed snake, and honestly, I can’t imagine how someone can fuck that up.”
He turned to Cam cheekily.
“I mean, what kind of voodoo dance do you have to attempt with your dick to spill the piss everywhere?”
Cam laughed and neglected to answer, but I filled in the gaps. I wasn’t sure it made me sound better, to tell the truth, but I was fairly certain it couldn’t make me sound worse.
“The medical tech—”
“Cute little blond?” Sean interjected.
I gave a tight nod, hoping the simple motion wouldn’t give too much away. “Yes.”
“Yeah, I remember her. Spunky little thing.”
Spunky little thing. I hated the way those three tiny words rolled off his tongue with ease.
“Aren’t you with someone?” I challenged irrationally, and just like that, I’d completely given away my hand. Two fucking months and the memory of her was still driving me crazy.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
“Why yes, yes, I am. How funny that you would notice.”
Cam laughed, pointing to Sean with a wag of his finger. “Annnd bring it up.”
I rolled my eyes, but they kept on.
“Seems like maybe he’s got a crush, Cam.”
“Seems extremely likely, Sean.”
“You two should take this on the road,” I remarked on a shake of my head. “Really.”
“Ah, come on, man,” Sean said with a laugh. “We’re getting to know you. Your likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses.”
Cam nodded. “So far we know you like blonds, and you’re weak as shit at peeing in a cup.”
At that, I laughed. A real genuine chuckle at my own expense. And finally, Sean’s smile turned from menacing to friendly.
Apparently, self-deprecation was the key to cracking his code.
“Come on, Leo. Let’s get a beer and talk a little more.”
I, of course, agreed readily. It was one thing to keep myself guarded until I proved my worth, but it was another to reject the idea of bonding with two of the most popular and talented guys on the team. Sean Phillips and Cam Mitchell wouldn’t be bad friends to have. Not at all.
Of course, all bad stories start with the good, and this one in particular was the beginning of how I made a decision I wasn’t sure I would have without the aid of so much alcohol.
Bottoms up!
Four hours later
While the rest of the party rolled on outside, Cam, Sean, and I sat inside Quinn Bailey’s basement and stared at Sean’s laptop.
“Trust me,” Sean slightly slurred for the ninth time in fifteen minutes as he flashed his agile fingers over the keyboard. “I use this profile for all kinds of shit, and no one has ever traced it back to me.”
“How do I know you’re not setting me up?” I asked with the expected mental clarity given how drunk I was. Which, yeah, equated to not very much.
“You don’t,” Cam comforted with a meaty-handed slap to my back. “You’re the rookie and you don’t know shit, but we know this. Sean’s got this. Trust.”
His pep talk was about as clear as mud, but somehow, in the moment, it was all I needed to hear. It was steadying and precise and encouraging all at once. Basically, as far as drunk Leo was concerned, drunk Cam was a genius.
Hell, if you’d asked me right then, I would’ve said Cam was a certified motivational speaker and should take that shit on the road. Oprah, Ellen, TED, the whole fucking shebang.
Clearly, we’d been heavy into the beer and liquor, and it’d be a minor miracle if I made it out of this without a monster fucking hangover tomorrow morning.
But for now, though, I was apparently only suffering from poor judgment.
Sean clicked the final button, and just like that, sent my romantic search into the ether of the internet.
“I’m telling you,” he said, just as he and Cam high-fived. “If you can’t find this girl with a post like this on Reddit, you can’t find her.”
I nodded my agreement, timid as it was, and recited the title of the post as it stared back at me.
Help me find the girl who spilled my pee: A desperate plea
I wasn’t sure if it was the best idea I’d ever heard or something I’d wholeheartedly regret once the alcohol had found its way out of my system.
But hell, with the way both Cam and Sean had appeared fucking certain of the Reddit game plan since I’d explained the whole mystery girl situation, I couldn’t muster any negative emotions toward my big, anonymous debut into online threads.
I mean, who knows, maybe I’ll actually find her?
At five minutes till eight, I pulled into the parking lot of a building that read Marty’s Craft Supplies. It matched Mable’s rundown of the job in both address and description, so I figured I’d found the right place and hopped out of my car to walk inside.
Truthfully, I couldn’t say I’d always been that successful in finding my new jobs on the first shot. I’d walked into the wrong place and argued with employees about how they should have been expecting me, been late thanks to driving in circles, and asked questionable things at a massage place I’d stumbled into while looking for the doggy day spa where I’d been hired to fill in as the shampoo specialist while one of the employees was on maternity leave.
I wasn’t always an airhead, but if you’ve ever heard about people with book smarts lacking in common sense, I was a good piece of real-life substantiation.
Just before I grasped my hand around the handle of the front door, an elderly woman standing off to the side called my name and startled me. “Gemma?” she asked. “Gemma Holden?”
I nodded, too dumbfounded to do anything else, and stepped away from the door hesitantly. I loved the elderly, especially sweet strangers who wanted to strike up a conversation, but I was so close to being on time for once. I didn’t need Aunt Bea to ruin it.
“Well, aren’t you a pretty little thing,” she said and eyed me up and down. “Christ, what I’d do to have my tits that perky again.”
The pint-sized woman appeared to be in her late seventies, hell, maybe even eighties, and her clothes displayed the most outlandish colors I’d ever seen on someone over the age of fifteen.
Neon pink clashed with glowing yellow, and what would have otherwise been simple nude flats were embellished with enough jewels to make Edward from Twilight look dim in the light of the sun.
Even her lipstick was the brightest shade of pink I’d ever seen.
Truthfully, I thought they’d stopped selling that shade around the time Madonna started speaking in an English accent in the nineties for no apparent reason, but evidently, I’d been dead wrong.
Finally, it fully registered that I’d never seen this lady in my life, yet she seemed to know me. Maybe it was the owner? Just getting some fresh air outside the store?
“Are you Marty?” I asked, and a raspy laugh escaped her throat.
“Oh no, honey,” she said. “I’d rather play bingo with the old church bitches in my neighbo
rhood than sell damn craft supplies like Marty.”
Old church bitches. I wasn’t sure whether to crack up laughing or feel bad for the Bible-beating broads. Whoever she was, she was funny. Still, I was on a clock, and my new job was waiting. I couldn’t risk losing out on thirty bucks an hour just to stand around and shoot the shit with one of the Golden Girls.
“So, uh, if you’re not Marty, then…?”
“I’m Alma,” she said and held out her hand to shake mine. “Your new boss.”
Okay. Had I accidentally done drugs this morning? Because I was officially confused.
“My new boss?” I asked and glanced between her and the store. “But…I was told to come to this address. To this store, in fact…” I paused and looked up at the store sign again just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.
Marty’s Craft Supplies stood out clear as day.
“Yeah, well, it was the only way I could get that old hag Mable to send me some help,” she said, as if it actually explained the confusion.
“So, let me get this straight. You’re not Marty, and you don’t own this store?”
“Correct.”
“Yet you’re the one who sent in the work request to my temp agency?”
“Honey, I’m not growing any younger here,” she said and pursed her bright-pink lips. “If it takes you any longer to understand this situation, I might croak before we actually get any shit done.”
She was a feisty old broad, that was for damn sure, but she was also running low on patience. And if she really was my new boss, it’d probably be a good idea to keep said patience from running on empty.
“Mind explaining why you had me meet you here?” I asked, desperate to have at least one unknown answered. “You know, at a shop that isn’t, in fact, your shop?”
She shrugged one bony, neon pink-covered shoulder. “It was the only way after the incident last year.”
“The incident?”
“It wasn’t a big deal, honey.” She tossed one apathetic hand into the air. “A minor confusion if anything, but Mable told me I wasn’t allowed to hire any more of their employees.”
Jesus Christ. What had I gotten myself into? Was it illegal? Did I need to start sharpening my shanks and figuring out ways for Abby to send them to me now?
Part of me was curious as hell and the other part of me was a bit scared, but the largest part of me still wanted the thirty dollars an hour.
I glanced up and down the street then back at Alma. “So, where is your shop?”
“Follow me. I’ll lead the way,” she said and headed in the direction of the side parking lot. When she opened the driver’s-side door of a pearl-white Cadillac, I paused.
“Uh… Your shop isn’t on this street?”
Tell me it’s not in your fucking car…
She shook her head and slid into the driver’s seat. “Just get in your car and follow me.” The engine of her boat-sized Caddy revved to life, and she shut the door before I could say otherwise.
Feisty and demanding, she was a woman on a mission, and not a single person, certainly not me, could stop her.
So I did what any chick needing a paycheck would do; I hopped into my Honda Civic, and I followed her.
Surely, this tiny, bright as the sun woman with enough sarcasm to make Amy Schumer look like a comedic amateur wouldn’t lead me toward danger. Blood was red, and red was obviously not bright enough to be her color. A slaughterhouse seemed unlikely.
And in the event I turned out to be wrong, I felt like the odds were in my favor if I had to outrun her.
The drive was short and sweet, and for a senior citizen, she had a bit of a lead foot.
She cruised at nearly fifty miles per hour through streets with speed limits of thirty-five, and whenever a stop sign got in her way, she rolled through that fucker without hesitation.
Before I knew it, she pulled her big-ass Caddy into a circular driveway on a cute little street in the suburbs of Long Island. Woodmere, I think the town was called.
The house connected to the driveway was surprisingly big.
Two stories with a stately entrance, it appeared that old Alma here had some money.
Or maybe, when she’d bought the house in 1930, it hadn’t been that expensive.
I pulled in behind the Caddy and was out of my Civic and a few feet behind her by the time Alma had shuffled her way up to the porch.
“Uh…is this your house?” I asked, and she nodded as she unlocked the front door.
“You bet your perky tits it is,” she said. “Welcome to my humble abode, Gemma.”
She pushed open the front door, but I stayed on the porch. I’d been big in my talk about thinking this wasn’t a slaughterhouse, but who knew what creepy things lurked inside. None of today had gone as I’d planned.
“I thought we were going to your shop?”
“This is my shop,” she retorted.
What?
“Get with the program, honey,” she said and waved impatiently for me to step inside. “You’re acting like we’re living in the damn Stone Age. Online retail is where it’s at.”
I stepped inside—hesitantly, mind you—and instantly the overwhelming smells of potpourri and one too many lemon-scented Yankee Candles filled my nostrils.
She shut the front door behind me and set her purse and keys down on the top of a midcentury-looking divider that separated the entryway from the living room.
Bright orange carpet. Green floral couches. And plastic coverings snugly placed over every damn seat in the house.
I might as well have taken a time machine back to 1963.
“Follow me,” she said and shuffled down the entryway, through the kitchen where orange appeared to be the theme, and into a back room that had to be the dining room. At least, that was my assumption given the table buried under all sorts of things.
“This is where you’ll be doing most of your work,” she said, pointing toward the table that, after closer inspection, I realized was littered with packages and bubble wrap. “I hope you’re a fast learner because I’m behind on about three hundred orders, and there’s more coming through every day.”
Three hundred orders? Jesus Christ.
“What is it you sell, exactly?”
“Alma’s Secrets specializes in pleasure. Toys, lingerie, you name it, and we’ve got it.”
“Toys?” I asked around a choked swallow. “As in sex toys?”
“You got it,” she said matter-of-factly. Like it was the most normal thing in the world for a lady of her age to be selling sex goodies online. “I have a main site of my own, but I also sell through Etsy and eBay.”
Alma chatted on about sex toys as she rifled through a big cardboard box and started pulling out some of her inventory while I stood silent. Overwhelmed.
Dildos.
Vibrators.
Lacy lingerie.
Bottles of numbing lube.
She was literally in the business of pleasure.
She’d run through at least six products and her likes and dislikes about each by the time she noticed I’d clammed up like a mobster in an interrogation room.
“Oh God, don’t tell me you’re like that last chickadee Mable sent over,” she muttered and set a package with the words “The Motherfluffer” written across it onto the dining room table. It took everything I had to form words, and I hadn’t understood the question.
“I’m sorry…what did you say?”
Luckily, or very unluckily, depending on how you looked at it, she repeated the question in her blunt version of layman’s terms.
“Are you a virgin?”
“Excuse me?” My eyes widened, and my pulse sped up at her audaciousness. “Are you really asking me if I’m a virgin?”
“Well, I kind of have to after the last incident that got me blackballed from Mable’s list,” she said without any ounce of shame written on her face. “It wasn’t my fault she sent the twenty-year-old version of the Virgin Mary to my house to do inventory. H
ow the hell was I supposed to know a simple vibrator would have her praying to Jesus?”
“I’m not a virgin, even though that’s definitely not any of your business. But, uh, how long have you been in the…pleasure business?”
“Let’s see,” she mused, taking a minute to think back through her memories. “I started this up about a year after my Donnie passed away. Actually, it was me and my best friend Rosie’s little company, but then she died about a year ago, and now it’s just me running the show.”
Instantly, my heart clenched in discomfort for her.
“I’m really sorry for your losses.”
She waved a hand in the air. “Don’t fret on it, honey. When you get to my age, everyone around you starts croaking. I’m just glad it wasn’t me.”
I wasn’t sure whether to laugh at her sarcasm or cry over the loss of her loved ones.
All I could do was nod. One hour with Alma had proved to be one hell of a ride, and for the first time in my life, I actually understood the saying “full of piss and vinegar.”
We both stood there for an awkward moment staring down at the dining room table filled with plastic debauchery, waiting for me to make a decision. She could tell I wasn’t sold, but she’d done all she planned in the way of convincing. I had to come to the conclusion on my own.
“So…are you staying or going?” she eventually asked as I met her eyes again.
“Well…” I paused for a brief moment as I tried to wrap my brain around what had to be one of the weirdest situations I’d ever found myself in.
Between the fact that she’d been blackballed from the temp agency I worked for, had tricked my boss with a fake store address, and sold a plethora of sex toys online, I wasn’t sure what to do.
Hell, I’d pay a lot of money to meet someone who would know what to do.
“I’ll be honest, Alma, I’m not quite sure—”
“How much did Mable say I’d pay you?” she asked suddenly, determination shaping her thinning brow.
“Thirty bucks an hour.” At the reminder of that, my resolve for my morals got a little bit thinner. But she spoke before I got the chance to.
“How about this… I’ll have Marty call Mable and tell her she has to pull the job opportunity because of financial reasons, and then you can come work for me and I’ll pay you thirty-five bucks an hour under the table?”